Chris Neville-Smith

Contents

Our House

Written by John Godber

Directed by Chris Neville-Smith

"We bought this when they were selling them cheap! Six thousand! It was worth twelve, but we got it half price ... Mr's Thatcher's idea. I mean, Ted was Labour through and through but he wanted his own house ... It all changed after the strike, didn't it?"

For forty-five years, May lived a pleasant life with her husband Ted in the same colliery house. Now a widow moving to a Spanish retirement villa, she spends her watching as furniture and memories are carried to the removal van. She reminisces about the last five decades: becoming a family, a caring community, the troubles of her wayward son, the struggles of the miners. But what has really move from her beloved home?

This play was premiered in 2001 at Hull Truck Theatre and is as relevant today is it was was back then. It's not only a story of one colliery family, but also the tale of the mining town they lived in. For whilst the past from long ago was a happy
working-class existence, the recent past is another story. This is
a bitter-sweet tale about the disintegration of mining communities after
the pits closed.

Where it was

Our House showed at the City Theatre on November Sunday 16th to Saturday 22nd as part of Durham Dramatic Society's main season in 2014.

Pictures

Here's a selection of production pictures to enjoy. All production photos taken at the dress rehearsal on Friday 14th November. Click on any photo for a larger image using my exciting new photo gallery tool.

And here's some older rehearsal photos taken during the rehearsal on the 3rd November.

How it went

In all honesty, Our House was the one play from my shortlist I didn't expect to be picked. With Durham Dramatic Society having a record of doing only "nice" Godber plays like Weekend Breaks, it was quite unprecedented to have a play where a large part of it was spent with the neighbours from hell effing and blinding.

I knew this wouldn't appeal to large sections of our regular audience, so I had to hope that this could draw in a different County Durham crowd who could identify with the themes of colliery closures. And it looks like this gamble may have paid off. I didn't manage to reproduce the stupidly high ticket sales of Improbable Fiction, but it looks like a large number of those people were indeed people who'd lived through similar circumstances themselves, or knew others who had.

In particular, one thing that seemed to go down unexpectedly well was a play set locally that people identified with. Our House was written by Godber to be set in the Yorkshire colliery town, and the only reason I transplanted it to the Durham coalfield was so that my cast could use their own voices and save the hassle of learning Yorkshire accents. But this is a story that could just as easily have been set in County Durham, and this decision seems to have gone down very well.

Oh, and apparently Pat Barker came to see it. This is because someone from St. Mary's Senior Common Room came to see the last play, Rope, liked it, and decided to organise trip out for everyone next time, and Pat Barker happened to be an honorary member, happened to be in Durham at the time, so this is the most famous person I have produced a- ... What do you mean "Who's Pat Barker?" Not another one. Look, she's only the author of the Regeneration Trilogy, you know, The Ghost Road, the one that won the Booker Prize? ... No? Honestly, some people. Right then, time for Wikipedia.

On the whole I can be quite pleased with this, so the only dampener is that I'm not sure it will be possible to do something like this again. Since this was chosen, the selection process has suddenly developed fixation with "audience appeal", whatever that means. I won't give you a blow-by-blow account here (anyone who really wants to know can contact me ask), but the bottom line is that I would not have submitted this play if I was trying to meet a confusing and arbitrary definition of audience appeal. So the future of plays like this and my involvement in them is uncertain. We'll see.

Archive

The old casting information is on an archive page if anyone wants that. (Anyone who wants to use the character descriptions for their own casting calls is welcome to do so.)